Item #: SCP-####
Object Class: Safe
Special Containment Procedures:
The church and its land adjoining SCP-#### is to be put under Foundation custody. Church services and civilian interaction are to be continued as normal, but the back garden of the church where SCP-####-2 is located is closed off to civilians under the guise of construction. The watershed connected to SCP-####-1 is to be monitored for blockage or pollution that could hamper its flow past SCP-####-2.
Description:
SCP-#### is a freshwater stream(SCP-####-1) and a small rectangular immersion basin (SCP-####-2) both located in XXXXXXX, Italy. The basin is projected to have the dimensions 3 m x 3.4 m x 1.2 m in its original state, but gradual erosion and degradation have partially filled the basin with debris. The basin walls are heavily weathered, but archaeological examinations have uncovered cross patterns etched on the surface of its bricks in the pattern consistent with other baptismal fonts of the Western Roman Empire (c. 300-700 C.E.).
SCP-####’s anomalous properties manifest as an Adonai-539 Event. It is triggered when all three off the following criteria:
- Exactly one sapient entity (labelled E-539-1 for convenient reference) with a conceptual grasp of semantics is present in the basin.
- Three separate flames are present within 3 meters of the basin’s outer wall.
- Stream water makes physical contact with E-539-1.
When all three conditions are met, water gushes in at the steady rate of 40.8 liters per second from multiple faucet-like openings wall until the basin is completely filled. In this span of time, E-539-1 is dissolved, and E-539-2 is formed in its place. When all three flames are extinguished, water begins to flow out of the basin at the same rate. The flames are automatically extinguished after two minutes and cannot be put out until then.
It is worth noting that the water that fills the basin is different from the native stream water, as it is significantly higher in salinity and alkalinity. It can be inferred that this water is drawn from an extraspatial area not in proximity to SCP-####. Water quality tests have confirmed that this water is also extremely concentrated with amino acids, hydrocarbons, and other biological substances. The water may also contain traces of other abnormal solutes consistent with the molecular composition of E-539-2.
E-539-2 is the designation for the object that replaces E-539-1 after an Adonai-539 Event. The properties and nature of this object vary wildly with each Adonai-539 Event (see Testing Logs ####-539). Research into possible correlations between properties of E-539-1 and E-539-2 is ongoing.
Testing Logs ####-539 (Supervised by Researcher Mantle):
Test ID #: ####.01
E-539-1-1: One D-Class (D-####-1)
E-539-1-2: One red rose and tag attached. Tag reads, “Happy Valentine’s, Marcia. I’m coming back soon. Love you and miss you, darling.” in handwritten black ink on pink cardstock.
Note: It turns out Marcia Lopez Lockweed’s the D-Class’s mother. Hmm. Does the basin call up childhood relics or something similar? Oh, wait! D-384792’s name is Rose! I can’t believe I missed that.
Test ID #: ####.10
E-539-1-10: D-####-16 “Garrison Wheaton”
E-539-2-10: One 65-year-old African-American man (“Lionel Garrison Wheaton”), genetically confirmed to be the deceased paternal grandfather of D-####-10. Interestingly, its interviews cross-referenced with federal records state that its last point of memory before the Adonai-539 is June 10, 19XX, roughly the time of D-####-10’s birth.
Note: If this thing calls up whatever you were named after and not just the general meaning of the name…it’ll be best to gather records of names and their personal origins from the subjects before I send them in. Also, it seems that subjects who are named after people are replaced by who the people were at the time either a) when the child was born or b) when the name was decided and set in stone. I’ll try to find an experiment to decide which one it is.
Test ID #: ####.17
E-539-1-17: D-####-17 “Harry Chiang,” named after a fictional character from the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling.
E-539-2-17: One 17-year-old White British male with black hair and, most noticeably, a lightning-shaped scar across his forehead.
E-539-2-17 is currently held in a thaumaturgically-reinforced Class III humanoid containment cell. It has demonstrated low-level thaumaturgic ability consistent with fictional portrayals (e.g. remote displacement of small objects, manifestation of small amounts of electromagnetic radiation to illuminate surroundings) and has attempted to breach containment with it. SCP preliminary documentation pending.
Psychological evaluations and interviews conducted with E-539-2-17 have concluded that it perceives a temporal displacement from a fictional time point roughly a few pages before the end of the book.
Note: Curious. We’ve been testing on subjects with names originating from real-life people until now. And now this recent experiment shows that we can pull incorporeal concepts out of thin air as long as the parents named their kid after it.
Test ID #: ####.18
E-539-1-18: D-####-18 “Joy Freeman,” named after the concept of happiness.
E-539-2-18: Beams of yellow candlelight and multicolored confetti. Personnel witnessing the Adonai-539 Event reported a smell of birthday cake and a general uplifting of mood for the next 4 hours.
Note: I rummaged through D-####-18’s parent’s social media accounts before the test and they really love birthday parties. They said it was a “freeman(sic) family tradition.” All right, so what this means is that the abstract concept itself is defined by the name-giver. So two people could have different interpretations of the concept of anger and their kids would yield different results when we dunk them in the basin.
I’m more fascinated by the implications of this project. Just think. We could name a D-Class after something we imagine that we need, like selective amnestics or alien superweapons, for example. I don’t know what the bigshots want; it’s above my clearance level, apparently. Anyway, then we pop them in the tub and they become what we need. I didn’t except that I was assigned to research something with so much potential.
Test ID #: ####.20
E-539-1-20: D-####-20 “Martin Lis” by birth, named after human rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. More notably identifies as non-binary and goes by the unofficially recognized name “Morgan Lis,” after Morrigan, Celtic goddess of war.
E-539-2-20: Several hundred ravens (Corvus corax) and one glowing armored woman-like humanoid. Humanoid then proceeded to levitate and perform [REDACTED], prompting immediate containment efforts by MTF Rho-5 (“Olympus Fallen”). Amnesticization performed on all personnel below Clearance Level 3 observing during testing.
Note: Wow. Jesus. Not doing that again, apparently. So now we know that we can’t just edit a D-Class’s birth certificate to something weird and plop them in the tub. They have to personally identify as the name and accept it as their own. In this case, D-####-20 rejected the deadname “Martin” and instead named themselves “Morgan.” It’ll be a lot harder to make the things we want. For example, we can’t just tell someone to name their kid “Alien Superweapon” and except the kid to stick with that.
Honestly, after this incident, I expected the Foundation to withdraw funding from such a potentially dangerous SCiP. But I checked the account today and they’re only increasing it. I think the higher-ups are starting to understand what this…this thing could really do if we use it right.
I’d better rewrite the entry. There’s a lot to catch up on.
Item #: SCP-####
Object Class: Safe Thaumiel
Special Containment Procedures:
The church and its land adjoining SCP-#### is to be put under Foundation custody. Church services and civilian interaction are to be continued as normal, but the back garden of the church where SCP-####-2 is located is closed off to civilians under the guise of construction. The watershed connected to SCP-####-1 is to be monitored for blockage or pollution that could hamper its flow past SCP-####-2.
Every January 26, one Adonai-539 Event is to be executed via Operation Maluma standards. (See Operation Maluma description below.) Personnel under Level 5 Clearance are to be admnistered Class-A amnestics following each event.
Description:
SCP-#### is a freshwater stream(SCP-####-1) and a small rectangular immersion basin (SCP-####-2) both located in XXXXXXX, Italy. The basin is projected to have the dimensions 3 m x 3.4 m x 1.2 m in its original state, but gradual erosion and degradation have partially filled the basin with debris. The basin walls are heavily weathered, but archaeological examinations have uncovered cross patterns etched on the surface of its bricks in the pattern consistent with other baptismal fonts of the Western Roman Empire (c. 300-700 C.E.).
SCP-####’s anomalous properties manifest as an Adonai-539 Event. It is triggered when all three off the following criteria:
- Exactly one sapient entity (labelled E-539-1 for convenient reference) with a conceptual grasp of semantics is present in the basin.
- Three separate flames are present within 3 meters of the basin’s outer wall.
- Stream water makes physical contact with E-539-1.
When all three conditions are met, water gushes in at the steady rate of 40.8 liters per second from multiple faucet-like openings wall until the basin is completely filled. In this span of time, E-539-1 is dissolved, and E-539-2 is formed in its place. When all three flames are extinguished, water begins to flow out of the basin at the same rate. The flames are automatically extinguished after two minutes and cannot be put out until then.
It is worth noting that the water that fills the basin is different from the native stream water, as it is significantly higher in salinity and alkalinity. It can be inferred that this water is drawn from an extraspatial area not in proximity to SCP-####. Water quality tests have confirmed that this water is also extremely concentrated with amino acids, hydrocarbons, and other biological substances. The water may also contain traces of other abnormal solutes consistent with the molecular composition of E-539-2.
E-539-2 is the designation for the object that replaces E-539-1 after an Adonai-539 Event. The properties and nature of this object vary wildly with each Adonai-539 Event (see Testing Logs ####-539). Research into possible correlations between properties of E-539-1 and E-539-2 is ongoing.
Testing by Researcher Lotte Mantle has yielded the following patterns of the nature of E-539-2 in relation to E-539-1:
The grizzly-faced scientist held his keycard up to the electronic lock, and then paused a few inches from the scanner before it could whirr and beep to life. He squinted. “Alto, I know we’ve done worse, but is this really necessary?”
Clef elbowed him in the ribs. “I’m telling you, it’s gotta be some kind of memetic plague ravaging the Site. 102 victims in the course of two weeks? That’s almost an 80% infection rate. This might be the only way we know if it needs to be contained.”
A passing trio of researchers flitted by like white-coated nuns, their gazes scanning the doctors once and then directed hastily to some other convenient focal point. Clef knew they’d buzz with whispering gossip once they drifted out of earshot. Since the Event, the couple had become the target for scalding glares among rebellious subordinates and, in some cases, hushed, adoring awe among the new, fresh-faced researchers. But at this point, enough staff had been subjected to the Event that any judgment was abated in fear of the Event victimizing the gossipers themselves in some laser-guided karmic embarrassment.
The Memetics Division had run the bottles through its system, but came up with nothing anomalous. Normal Hume levels, no discrimination in effects. No compulsions, no hallucinations, no mind-warping. They’d even flushed Pepsico’s Aquafina factories with “sanitation inspectors,” only to find nothing short of a healthy, nonanomalous manufacturing process from raw plastic to finished bottle.
There was only one thing constant across Event sufferers. They had A) come in memetic contact with the Event and B) found a situation in which invocation of the Event was a rational decision. It was almost as if the universe itself wanted the Event to happen.
Kondraki grunted and slapped his key on the scanner panel, which beeped once and shone green. “I know you too well to buy that. You don’t give a damn about containment. You just want it to suffer alongside you, don’t you?”
“Some may argue that, but no one short of the Fives can stop me. Not even you.” Clef shrugged and grinned.
Kondraki turned his gruff head. “That’s assuming that I actually want to.”
“Exactly my point. Now hurry up.”
“Fuck you.”
There was once a time where Clef had regarded his boyfriend’s barbs and arrogance with jealousy-fueled fury, but now . . . who was he kidding? That hadn’t changed at all. They still dueled regularly to win the loving eyes of Site-19 subordinates, except they couldn’t use actual rapiers anymore. It was a shame, but O5 orders were O5 orders. He never anticipated he'd have to learn to fence with a broomstick, but he had the feeling that the Command would ban those soon as well.
Side by side, the Serpent Madman and the King of Butterflies strode through the sliding doors to drink in the technical hubbub of researchers milling about 682’s observation deck.
As they paced through the various data stations, camera feeds, and computer interfaces to approach the wall-length window, the pair pushed past a sea of white coats and clipboards. The brisk throngs of scientists were parted like iron fillings repelled by magnets. None of them looked up from their devices and notebooks. Clef exhaled and let his shoulders sag. His research team had grown acclimated to the larger-than-life figure that he was, and even more to the belligerent presence of Kondraki, and only sometimes would he have to wrangle a new team member out of hero worship. He liked to pretend that he didn’t care what people thought of his connection with the Event, but really? He wasn’t sure that recent happenings fit his image as Site-19’s resident chain-smoking, bixie-slaying bad boy. A wholly inaccurate image, but an image nonetheless.
The testing chamber was a lofty, floodlit bruise of an area. A metal box large enough to hold a department store. Clef’s vantage from the fourth floor plexiglass windows allowed him to do a sweeping survey of all the damage that it had suffered through the years: claw marks, discolored acid stains, dents in the walls from bodies tossed by gnarled maws. Clef weathered a downpour of memories of each incident, clenching his jaw with an old, nostalgic determination. He had stood in this exact spot many times before, tunneled eyes tracing the bloodbath below, lips pursed and ready to give the order that would activate eight automated tranquilizer turrets embedded in the roof.
He’d even stood down there once. He would never forget the smell of musk and acid in the chamber, the smell that no amount of scrubbing could remove. And, behind the jungle mane that had no business growing on a “reptile,” those two ancient, sunken eyes, twin catheter needles pumping bile into the marrow of his skull.
He did not stand there now. No, something else did. His gaze snagged on a small blue dot placed one-thirds of the way from the door to the testing area.
A solitary Aquafina bottle.
“Clef, the test is ready to be administered. On your count.” He looked down to see one of his most faithful researchers waiting for his command. The researcher’s fingers drummed at the clipboard he was clutching, obviously itching to push the button that would slide open the thick blast doors at the other end of the chamber.
“Everything prepared? Hydrochloric acid systems? Breach control? How about the two memetanks?”
At this, the stoic researcher struggled to suppress a grin, so he turned and waved to two pale-faced women chatting by a camera monitor. One left her spot to watch the window, offering an organic set of senses to the other’s digital. “Yes, two personnel that scored higher than a 60 on the Anomalous Cognition Resistance Scale are here. Your mind is safe and everything is primed.”
Clef beamed. He clapped his hands twice. He knew the acoustics of the room would carry his words into the ears of all his subordinates, as long as he stood in this exact spot. The eyeballs of all twenty researchers trained on him. All twenty researchers except Kondraki, who continued to curse loudly about Cheetos and kick the vending machine in the back.
“All right, everyone! Let’s bottle up some lizard dick!”
The researchers cheered. Kondraki gave up and joined Clef at the window, still muttering about his inaccessible chips.
At three seconds, a long, dark projectile barreled and clawed through the gap in the still-opening blast doors, tossing its head and spewing saliva across the air. The testing area vibrated with impact.
At five, the entire lizard emerged, still sizzling and dripping with acid. It shook itself off, spraying burning drops on the windowpane. But it stopped there.
Clef narrowed his eyes. Unlike the many previous times, it did not immediately slam and tear into the other set of doors. It approached the center of the testing area with caution, gingerly stepping one paw at a time towards the blue dot in front of the door.
When it neared 10 meters of the bottle, it hesitated. Clef could feel the filling and depleting of the monstrous lungs of the creature in the seismic ups and downs of its dorsal spines. The research team fell silent, as if awaiting the lizard to suddenly tear through the chamber and wreak destruction on the Site. He whacked Kondraki’s shoulder, earning a displeasured grunt. “Hey. Look at this. He’s really gonna do it.”
Rushing forward, Kondraki leaned against the window and precariously pressed his palms against the glass. He chuckled, low, watching the lizard circle the bottle like a lioness readying for an ambush. Though its eyes were hidden by a thick vine-like mop of hair, Clef knew its gaze never left the little bottle and imagined the plastic would disintegrate with a few more minutes of its stare. “Holy shit. He’s really gonna do it. Clef, he’s gonna fucking do it. Get over here and see for yourself,” he whispered, enraptured.
Clef scrambled to join his boyfriend, and the two most respected and feared scientists on Site 19 huddled around 682’s observation window like children around a candy shop display case, eyes wide, palms spread flat against the glass in a subconscious desire to be as close to 682 as permitted, sometimes shaking each other’s shoulders in excitement.
At three minutes, 682 shuddered once, twice, as it had done so in previous mind-altering tests. It lurched forward on its feet, stepped back, then jerked in the direction again. It began a twirling, swaying loop around the bottle in a struggle to escape the probing tendrils of whatever cognitohazard lay in its polymer confines.
Clef wiped away the breath vapor on the glass to get a better view of 682 stumbling in its nauseous tap dance. “Wow. Looks like the jackasses over in Memetics didn’t do their job right.”
Kondraki nodded. “Maybe the bottle brainwashed them into declaring it wasn’t anomalous.”
“Don’t they toss it in a scanner though? Check its Humes or some shit; I don’t know. Making memetically-susceptible people determine whether something’s memetic or not sounds like a bad idea to me.”
A peaceful, observational silence. And then Konny had to break it.
“You know what’s memetic as hell?" Kondraki offered, nonchalant. Clef dreaded his next words. "The Event."
Clef froze, turned, and curled his lip. “Do you really have to bring this up again? After all I’ve done for you, you can’t just let this fucking thing go?" Clef inhaled. "You did this to us. Not me. And the only reason it’s memetic—the only reason people keep talking about it—is because you won’t shut up about it.”
“Jesus Christ, Alto. Guess I finally found something that you give a shit about. Look around you. You’re the one who called for this dumb test to be administered. And I had to do all the paperwork and plead and throw away all semblance of dignity in front of the Council just to get this damn thing approved because someone is a hated piece of shit who can’t spend fifteen minutes in a room without making everyone else in it either leave or draw weaponry!”
Clef pushed up from the window and tossed his hands up. He was not up for carrying out this conversation. However, it was Kondraki, so it was pretty much a moral obligation to continue it. “Hey, that’s not fair and you know it. Who carried your limp ass bridal-style through a burning building? Me. Who called your son to help you? It’s me again. Who—“
“You didn’t have to call my son, dammit!” Kondraki roared.
Clef fished a pen from one of his researchers’ pockets and jabbed it square at Kondraki’s stout nose. “Yes, I did! For reasons I choose not to disclose right now! Besides, don’t act like you care who I tell or even who they tell it to. As far as I know, you’re enjoying all the attention you get from the Event.”
“If, by attention, you mean people stop pestering me, then that’s completely correct.”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” Clef sighed. Fucking Konny didn’t understand how society worked. That fucking nerd. “People stopped bothering us because we’re social outcasts! The O5s already hate my guts—“
“Clef, don’t bullshit me; you’re proud of that and it’s your own fault you can’t keep your damn—”
“The one thing I don’t need is being completely rejected by these research nerds.” He waved around wildly at the confused lab workers. “I didn’t even know you could get rejected by nerds! Nerds are supposed to be ones rejected, not the other way around!”
Silence. Clef realized he was standing on a swivel chair brandishing the pen in a fencing stance.
He felt the knowing smirks of his research team nailed on him, and his face burned. His shoulders heaved up and down from the outburst. He had just got himself rejected even more. He dared not make eye contact with any of his staff, instead glaring straight at Kondraki, hoping he will only be known as The Guy Who Fights Kondraki at the Most Inopportune Times.
And then he formed his mouth into a sheepish grin and dropped his offensive hand. The researchers lowered their heads again to continue with their work. Yes. Keep it cool. Alto Clef was cool, and not in the fake way those pretentious skip-maker hipsters were. They were not cool yet, because one cannot be cool if one constantly mistakes blunts with paint tubes, smoking with the wrong one, and painting with the wrong one. Dr. Alto Clef did not smoke blunts and did not paint, so that was a problem no one had to deal with. Dr. Alto Clef was real cool.
Kondraki rolled his eyes and turned back around to face the window. “Well. You learned something new today. At least 682 still respects you,” he suggested.
That was true. The thought of being respected by an immortal killer lizard smoothed Clef’s broken ego a bit, but not enough. “Don’t you dare tell him about it. I don’t need you fucking up and holding a therapy session with Godzilla here about everything that went wrong in your life, especially if it concerns me.”
“Actually, now that you mention it . . . ” Kondraki stroked his beard in a caricature of thoughtfulness.
“God, Ben. Fucking don’t. I know it’s probably the opposite for you, but I’d like to keep Mr. Killer Lizard on my good side, thank you. He’s the last sapient entity I’d prefer to know about the Event.”
“Well, if you think about it, he’s the only sapient enti—hey! Where’d he go?”
Clef rushed to his side, sending the chair skittering into some poor researcher’s desk, and scanned the chamber floor. The lizard was, indeed, gone, along with the bottle. He blinked once, twice, in hopes that he’d clear some veil from his eyes and see 682 and the bottle, preferably attached to each other. His head spun. Had it returned to the containment tank? No, it wouldn’t do that. The breach klaxons stayed unlit and silent, meaning it was still in the testing chamber. He ran his eyes over the walls to his left and right. Nothing. And then, he looked down.
Down, straight into the two wild eyes that bored into him like a whirring dental drill. Impaled on 682’s serrated teeth were the crushed shards of the bottle.
Alto froze in place as the lizard slowly pulled itself up the wall with sticky suction sounds. In his peripheral vision, Clef registered light glancing off glossy fluids on its digits. The wall groaned with its weight.
“Am I clear to tranquilize it?” the systems controller asked from across the room.
Clef stared, still, into those soulless eyes. He did not remember to answer for a long, unmeasurable time. “Oh. Yeah, uh. Don’t knock him out yet. He has something to say.”
“Sir?”
“Trust me. If he wanted to kill us, he would have breached containment through the other doors, not climbed all the way up here. This direction is a dead end.”
“So we’re just going to let it climb up to the window?”
“You got it. Whatever it is, it’s going to be important. Hell, I don’t even know how much effort it took to store fucking label glue DNA in its genes.” Clef repressed the thought of other things people store in their “genes.” He wished he’d stored it in his jeans, not in that dumb fucking bottle. “But if he chose to do this instead of breach, we should find out why.”
“Alto, this is madness!” Kondraki interjected.
“Trust me. You’ll want to hear this.”
And so Clef watched, coiled, as the giant lizard’s head emerged to eye level. It was an ancient, wild thing, a lithe predator that would only be a match to Earth’s primitively evolved organisms several thousands of years in the future. A true biological anachronism. And its eyes, sunken deep into the skull, were absolutely ghastly. Although its talons poised right underneath the window, Clef would bet money that they would not harm him. 682 was an intelligent being, far more intelligent than even some humans, and 682 had repeatedly demonstrated that it had big plans for him. Plans that only involved death at the very end of them.
Still, it took a lot of courage and internal pep talking for him to approach the glass and wolf whistle on impulse. Fuck. Fuck his dumb panic response. Why did it have to be a wolf whistle?
It ignored him. 682 opened its long maw and lazily lolled out a snaking yellow tongue to clean its teeth of the bottle remains, and then it spat the plastic shards on the window glass. The pieces dripped downward, each englobed in a drop of saliva. Clef stared. It stared back.
Then, a harsh, sonorous rumble filled the chamber, a guttural vibrating that could only loosely be described as laughter. Its gullet gaped, and Clef cherished a close-up view of the lizard’s many rows of crooked teeth and cavernous green throat fluted like a hot-air balloon.
“Light-bringer . . . ” it rumbled with a voice of shredded satin bass. “I thought you were above these . . . viscous organ bags.” Each word fell from the air gracefully, an effect that very deep voices tend to possess.
Clef chuckled nervously. His heart hammered in his throat, face, and fingertips. “What do you mean?” He winced inwardly. In contrast with the lizard’s, his voice sounded comically squeaky. He found his hands were slick with sweat, so he thrust them inside his white coat’s pockets, hoping no one would see them tremble. He was Alto Clef, and he was not afraid of this caged zoo animal. Not one bit.
The lizard’s lips curled to reveal more teeth. A smirk? Somewhere hidden deep under layers of fear and the strange, fatal pulling he felt to the lizard, the science side of Clef was impressed that it could mimic human facial communication. He hoped he would remember the thought long enough to jot it in a log note.
It tossed its head and roared. “What kind of juvenile makes a mistake like that? Oh, I had expected so much better from you, you greasy little pervert.”
Fuck it. Fuck this. Clef felt the blood rush to his ears. “Wait, wait, wait. Is this—Is that about that?”
“You should now know that everything that concerns you is about . . . that.”
“Okay. Okay. Hoo boy.” Clef took a deep breath and muttered a therapeutic string of curse words he hoped no one heard. A very practiced part of his brain, the part that constructed elaborate and ingenious alibis, clicked to action. “I can explain. I can explain ev—“
“It was me. It started with me.” Kondraki stepped forward to meet 682’s gleaming ossified head. His hands were planted on his stocky hips in a proud action figure stance, head held high, and the light streaming from the window cast a heuristic movie poster silhouette to his back. Clef boggled at him for a brief while before his brain kicked back into action and resumed fuming.
“Konny, what the fuck? What the actual fuck do you think you’re doing?” Clef hissed at him.
“You made a fool of yourself so I wouldn’t feel alone, so it’s only fair that I returned the favor.”
Clef pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, you shithead, that’s not how it fucking works! For one, you’re friggin’ proud of it.”
“So? I thought we didn’t judge on intent here, good doctor.”
“Maybe not, but you’re just humiliating me in front of the lizard. What kind of dick boyfriend humiliates his partner in front of the lizard? There’s a code for this and you just broke it.”
“God, Alto. You’re so ungrateful. I’m trying to save your red little ass here if you couldn’t tell.” He raised his voice and looked the lizard in the eye. Before Clef could give him a good whap on the shoulder, he spoke.
“It was me. I put the bottle on his dick,” he gladly declared as if he were giving a pre-battle speech to a legion of his troops.
Then, like a dam breaking before a flooded river, Kondraki burst into a snorting guffaw. The researchers behind him tittered hesitantly, eyes still . With horror, Clef faced the realization that he would never be able to regain the dignity he had once wielded like a rapier. The lizard stared at him and cocked its head, amused, but he turned away this time, furious and indignant. He curled into a chair, covered his hot face, and moaned.
A tremor rocked the chamber. The lizard growled again. “Dick-bottler . . . ” Oh, no.
No more “Light-bringer.” It was “Dick-bottler” now, wasn’t it? His moniker for eternity. Clef closed his eyes and prayed for the lizard to smash through the glass and end his sorry existence once and for all, preferably killing dumb fuck Konny in the convenient meantime.
“One more thing. The knowledge you seek.”
Clef removed his hands and looked up.
A smile distorted the lizard’s face. “The bottle was never a mind hazard. You are just a dumb fucking piece of—“
“That’s it.”
Clef rose, shaking and burning, fists curled in his pockets. “Initiate tranquilization,” he called, utterly without a fuck to give.
At his command, twenty-four giant puff-tipped darts buried themselves in 682’s scaly hide.
Its body hit the ground four stories below with a colossal thud. Two minutes later, a languid stream of orange-suited workers flowed from the door to clean it up.
“Well.” Clef sat down gingerly in his swivel chair. He ran a hand through his sweaty hair and took a deep, shaky breath. The lizard’s sleep had released a tense knot in the room, and the researchers chatted amicably now. Kondraki resumed eating his chips. Only Alto remained afraid and reeking of adrenaline.
He slowly spun around on his swivel chair, making deliberate eye contact with every single personnel in the room, from the systems manager, to the junior assistants, to the memetanks, to Kondraki, who stuck his tongue out. Only when he was sure he held all of the gazes in the room did he spin back around and castle his fingers in a desperate grasp for villainous poise.
“Needless to say, we’re expunging all of that.”
Per 
